Vielsalm – Born railway line
| Vielsalm Born | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Route number : | 47A | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Route length: | 23.0 km | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gauge : | 1435 mm ( standard gauge ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Vielsalm – Born railway line was a railway line in the former German-Belgian border area. It connected the Vennbahn (Aachen - Luxembourg) near Born with the Liège - Luxembourg line near Vielsalm . It was number 47A on the Belgian network. The route was 23 km long and existed for exactly 23 years (from 1917 to 1940). Today it is closed and completely dismantled.
A long- distance bike trail has been laid out on or along the route since 2013 . The entire route is to be largely expanded as a Pré-RAVeL . Since February 2017, the Poteau section has been legally expanded.
history
The first efforts to build a railway line from Born to Vielsalm were made in 1893. However, the civilian need for such a line was comparatively low. The military need, however, became great after it became clear that the Schlieffen Plan would become the preferred German course of action in the event of a war against France. After the outbreak of World War I , at the end of 1914, Lieutenant Colonel Groener, who was responsible for German war railway logistics, ordered the construction of several strategic railway lines to better serve the front in the Franco-Belgian border area towards the Ardennes , Liège and Flanders .
These included two generously dimensioned double-track main railways running almost parallel at a distance of only about 10 km in east-west direction, which started from the German Vennbahn on the one hand in Vielsalm (from Born, line 47A) and on the other in Gouvy (from St. Vith, line 163) created a connection to the main line Luxembourg - Liège (and ended in ruins or insignificance after 1945). With these two new lines one could consistently double-track and without time-consuming changes of direction z. B. from Cologne (via Monschau ) to Gouvy or from Gerolstein (via St. Vith ) to Liège and back. (The German occupiers also expanded the previously single-track Vielsalm - Trois-Ponts - Rivage section of the Luxembourg - Liège line to two tracks from 1915 to 1916, but apparently had little interest in the Vielsalm - Gouvy section.)
In accordance with military requirements, the new Vielsalm - Born route was also double-tracked, with fixed engineering structures for later use in peacetime, largely without level crossings and, so that the heavy loads to be expected could be easily transported, with only slight inclines. In the course of the route, hardly any consideration was given to civilian transport needs. There were initially no intermediate stops on the route. Although nominally cross-border, the construction was straightforward because the Belgian part was under military occupation by the German Reich at the time.
The approximately 23-kilometer route was built by German construction companies. Up to 4,000 workers (including numerous prisoners of war, mainly Russian), 54 light rail locomotives and 15 excavators were used. On August 14, 1916, the first of the two line tracks was laid on the bridge at Hermanmont and on the next day it was used for the first time by a state railway train for the railway troops. On January 10, 1917, rail operations began on the entire route.
After the end of the First World War, the eastern part of the line also came to Belgium as a result of the cedings under the Versailles Treaty . The Belgian Railways took over the operation and ran the route as line 47A. In 1921 the stations Recht and Vielsalm-Sous-Bois as well as the stops Ligneuville and Burtonville were established. In 1931 the second track was dismantled. After German troops began to march into Belgium in World War II on May 10, 1940, the Belgian military blew up two pillars of the Hermanmont Viaduct on the same day, interrupting the route. The Deutsche Reichsbahn continued operations between Recht and Born on the remaining eastern section . As a result of the destruction during the Battle of the Bulge , this had to be stopped in 1944.
After the end of the Second World War, the line remained largely closed due to the interruption at the blown viaduct. The tracks east of it were removed in 1952. Only in the far west was freight traffic operated between Vielsalm Bahnhof and Vielsalm-Sous-Bois under line number 220 until 1972. In 1973 this remnant was also dismantled.
Route description
The route began at Born train station in the Malmedy district on the east side of the Vennbahn. This would have made it possible to bring direct trains from the east via the planned Ourtalbahn without having to cross the Vennbahn. The construction of the Ourtalbahn was stopped shortly after the start of the war at the end of 1918. Initially leading to the north, the route now crossed the Vennbahn with a flyover structure , the Freiherr-von-Korff Bridge, in order to continue in a westerly direction. At the village of Recht , the route bent in a south-westerly direction, only to cross the former German-Belgian border shortly afterwards. The descent into the valley of the Salm was made by means of two hairpin bends . Once in the valley, the line branched out to enable direct connections both to the north (double-track connecting curve) in the direction of Rivage - Liège and to the south (single-track connecting curve) to the Vielsalm train station and on to Gouvy .
Buildings
There are two remarkable structures along the way.
The Hermanmont viaduct, consisting of 10 arches, was located above Vielsalm in the southern of the two bends in a radius of 300 m and a gradient of 6.6 per thousand. It was 260 meters long and 33 meters high. After the blast in 1940 it was not rebuilt. Over the decades, individual pillars collapsed again and again: the first during the war shortly after the demolition, the next on June 26, 1955 around 8:30 a.m., another in the 1960s, and one each in May 1979 and on June 26, 1989 around 4 p.m. The torso has not changed since then, so that the two bridgeheads, the arch adjoining the eastern bridgehead and an isolated central pillar still exist today.
To the north of Born is the Freiherr von Korff Bridge with 11 arches. This viaduct is 285 meters long and 18 meters high. It was built between March 13th and November 21st, 1916. 19,000 cubic meters of concrete were needed to build it. This bridge was also provided with explosive chambers, but the demolition planned for May 1940 was not carried out for unknown reasons. The bridge is named after the former district administrator of the Malmedy district, Friedrich Freiherr von Korff .
literature
- Fredy Thonus, Klaus-Dieter Klauser, Charles Legros: A small railway line in the Eifel-Ardennes area (Le Rail en Ardenne-Eifel) - The Vielsalm - Born line (47A) (bilingual German / French), publisher: Vereinigung Val du Glain, Terre de Salm (Vielsalm) and History Association Between Venn and Schneifel ( St. Vith ), 2016, ISBN 9789491261336
Web links
- Documentation with numerous old photos of the different conditions (Dutch and French)
- The Hermanmont Viaduct (Dutch)
- The railway in Born on the website of the History and Museum Association Between Venn and Schneifel
- Detailed documentation with many photos on the state of 2006 ( Memento from May 31, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (Dutch)
- Characteristics of the route ( Memento of May 16, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) on the Wim de Ridder website (Dutch, French, English)
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Hans Schweers, Henning Wall: Railways around Aachen: 150 years of the international route Cologne - Aachen - Antwerp . Verlag Schweers + Wall, Aachen 1993, ISBN 3-921679-91-5 , p. 117